Team Egg Roll Charity Drive! Fold Your Company Challenge!

What's up everybody! Out of all the forums we have, the Distributed Computing Arcana is one of the smallest. Which is a shame because everybody here is doing some amazing work in the name of our community. Look at that, overall global team position: 2nd Place! Now that's not just from a passion in the topics that have brought us together on these forums in the first place. Clearly that's coming from a large passion we all share in helping our fellow man & making the world a better place. I mean just look at that list, it covers a wide range of humanity's most important sciences, interests, & greatest problems.

Now I've been part of this community since 2000, reading it since 99. I've been to Ars meets all over the United States & my best friends from here are spread out all over the world. We've all aged & grown, built careers, built companies, built families. If you look back at something that used to bring us together, something that use to be huuuge in its glory days, it was Team Egg Roll. [TER] Now at the time of posting we have just shy of 5,000 community members that have signed up to help the cause. Though currently, we have less then 50 dedicated folders. I mean we used to have Hall Of Fame threads on these forums celebrating people's contributions. It was something everybody could do, no matter where you came from or what background, we had the required tools already. Simply by harnessing the systems we were using to communicate with each other. This has not changed, and in fact as shown above, it's happening at a greater rate then ever before.

Though less then 50 dedicated folders? No sir. No ma'am. We are one of the greatest communities on the internet! Team Egg Roll, our Folding@Home team, representing Ars across the vast digital oceans, needs a good ol'fashion revival! Jump back a week ago, I was showing another long term Arsian one of the branches for a medical company I've setup. We were discussing the future of treatment for all the things we're researching, spit-balling wild possibilities, just having a good time with it. Then he looked at me & said, "hey, you tested any of this gear in the distributed realm yet?" To which, embarrassingly, my only reply was "no." He stared at me dumbfounded & then asked if I was being greedy, mining bitcoins or some other digital currency. I said no they were just for the employees or I guess me after hours. The look of confusion in his eyes as to why it was just going unused lit an immediate fire underneath me.

So I walked around & installed their client across various machines. We spent a couple hours nerding out watching everything, making sure some of the higher end gear wasn't acting funky or anything, though really it was completely effortless. Fast forward that week to the present...I'm currently folding 46.6% of Team Egg Roll. You know what this cost me? Less then one kWh of electricity while it's crunching. I understand alot of the world is struggling right now, but for those of us in positions like this, I down right challenge every last one of you to convert your companies into folding empires. There has got to be Arsians out there in charge of layers of technology I can't even comprehend. See the word "charity" in the thread title? It's time for you guys to step up & do some extra good in the world by harnessing that leftover power you have that's just sitting around at night.

What Is Folding@Home? How can I Help?

Lifted right off the homepage, rather simplified: "Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some of the numbers." Though if you'd like an extended dab: "Proteins are biology's workhorses- its "nanomachines." Proteins help your body break down food into energy, regulate your moods, and fight disease. Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology much of the process remains a mystery. When proteins do not fold correctly (misfolding), there can be serious health consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, AIDS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers. If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses." Want to know even more? Or inspire somebody around you? Here's a wonderful YouTube Video they did promoting the project.

How to start? Simply install their software & let it run in the background. You can specify a name you would like the contributed work to show up under or do it anonymously. Though if you would like to represent Team Egg Roll, you need to make sure to join team 14. Now I'm sure you could head over to the official folding@home thread if you had any questions on how all the work units, crunching difficulties, & point systems come together. Though the important thing to know is you're helping out no matter what. Now for the more competitive of you out there, here's an excellent link to our team's Extreme Folding page where you can see our communities current contributions as they come in live. (updates every three hours) If you have any questions feel free to post them! If you need a hand getting things setup then just ask, do not fear, we do not bite!

Now come on Ars, I'm calling you all to attention! Let's fire this thing up again. We're currently the 39th folding team in the world. I'm positive we can do better then that.

I fired this up a few weeks back. In fact, you can see me at the bottom of your screenshot - number 25. I'm the 25th most active producer using just my several-years-old home desktop. I'll admit, I was happy enough to be sneaking up the ranks (cracked the top 500 this week), but I'd be even happier to see the team move up. Let's do this!

You would have had more discussion if it was in the established Folding@Home thread.I am on the other side of your experience, I retired in August and the PCs at my former employer are slowly losing F@H.

You would have had more discussion if it was in the established Folding@Home thread. I am on the other side of your experience, I retired in August and the PCs at my former employer are slowly losing F@H.

Yeah I wanted to try an create a new thread in order to drive views & hopefully from that, more folders! Specifically I was hoping to find other people/companies that would blow me completely out of the water so that we could start gaining those global ranks in the name of Team Egg Roll! We have seen an increase in total folding power since posting, but not like I was hoping. Times are hard & every last dollar counts to a lot of people, even companies. It's far easier & much cheaper just to turn off equipment at night. Though speaking of your former employer slowly dropping the folding power out, we just crossed paths on the leader boards! Though even my folding has slowed at times lately, there's entire days where every machine is already being used to the max for long haul operations. If I could keep these babies folding I'd be in second place within the next three months! Though suicidebiker, whew that's going to take a while. Not scheduled to overtake him for the crown until 5pm on 10.01.18 or in 1.5 years. Well everybody, I'll keep'em crunching as long as I can.